Kirby’s Epic Yarn suddenly becomes R-Type Stage 3.
If this happening more than once isn’t a disqualifying criterion, then Cuphead.
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Sorting by year would be really revealing; I feel like more platformers than not had a shooter sequence between '86-'90 (maybe up until the heavily-animated 16-bit platformers like Aladdin came to the fore?)
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I feel like opening with an stg stage is way cooler than having one later on. But I also don’t think nier automata is that cool. Are there others
And I have also always read STG as ShooTingGame
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Kirby and the Amazing Mirror also uses a STG section at the very end and lets you rack up points over the credits sequence.
This page has a few we don’t have; sorry I don’t have the time to rip them out in quote form. I shouldn’t even be posting right now.
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Giving a cursory glance, Ultima is on the list and that’s fucked up.
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I had totally forgotten about the one in Beyond Good & Evil.
Also there was a Stinkoman game? I guess of course there was.
Dunno if these are ‘out of nowhere’ because they are Treasure games, but Gunstar Heroes has the spaceship bit near the end where it turns into a hori shmup.
The remake/reimagining Gunstar Super Heroes has lots of different shmupper sections, usually doing wacky things with the GBA’s equivalent of Mode 7. A helicopter vertical shmup level, which is really difficult because you have a huge hitbox, and a remake of the original shmup level, where the level rotates while your ship stays hori, stand out.
Mega Man 5 (Gameboy) has a shmup section for when you approach Wily’s space fortress.
Mega Man 5 has simple shmup-like water-bike segment in Wave Man’s stage. X4, X5, and X8 have similar levels too.
Mega Man 8 has shmup sections in Tengu Man’s stage and Wily 2.
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This thread is currently quoted on icyclam’s frontpage.
Well that’s fucking terrifying.
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Unsurprisingly his writing got worse instead of better, or at least much more blatantly narcissistic.
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what’s really terrifying is that php-nuke c. 2005 layout.
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So he got out of prison huh
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Haha his site is hilariously unreadable on mobile. And yeah, he’s only gotten shittier, of course.
it’s unreadable on desktop, too. it was all cut off. i think he called SB effeminate.
On a brighter note, I added a bunch more to the list. I am trying to focus a little bit more on games that have this as part of the regular progression of the game, but also sits outside of the expectations of the rest of the game. That’s why I’m recording pretty much everything, but calling certain things edge cases.
It’s the non sequitur part of all this that’s the most interesting to me. Especially because it seems especially focused around STG for some reason.
Some observations: Kirby is actually a pretty late NES game. So are the listed MegaMan games. While I don’t have a full list of dates yet, from looking at the ones I recognize this seems to be much more of an early 90s thing than I would have necessarily expected. It seems to have a definite home in the overlap between NES and SNES, but I do need to to actually put the numbers all into a document to know for sure.
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Wait, is there forum beef history I’ve yet to learn?
Is there a reason you want to focus on surprise STG’s and not other abrupt genre changes? I find Sonic Mania’s Mean Bean Machine boss and Sonic Adventure’s pinball Spinball casino fascinating.
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You don’t even have the beginning of an idea
Don’t worry, none of it matters
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Air Fortress would absolutely not belong in this thread because that game is an even split between STG and platforming (and in fact the platforming comes as more of a surprise than the STG)
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